Speech Accessibility Project expands to Canada

Newswise — The Speech Accessibility Project is now recruiting in Canada.

The project is now recruiting Canadian adults with Parkinson’s disease, cerebral palsy, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, Down syndrome and those who have had a stroke. Funded by Big Tech companies Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta and Microsoft, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign is using the project to train voice recognition technologies to understand people with diverse speech patterns and disabilities.

The project is also recruiting adults in the United States and Puerto Rico.

“The accessibility community in Canada has been an inspiration to me because of their consistent, positive, enthusiastic support for one another,” said Mark Hasegawa-Johnson, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Illinois and the project’s leader. “People in Canada with Parkinson’s disease, cerebral palsy, and Down syndrome have been reaching out to us since the beginning of the Speech Accessibility Project. I’m very happy that we are finally able to invite them to participate in the projects.”

The project has collected more than 400,000 recordings. Its collaborators also recently published their first peer-reviewed paper. They used recordings from participants with Parkinson’s disease to make an automatic speech recognizer 30% more accurate.

The project is also sharing data with several other organizations that have signed off on the project’s data use agreement.

One of the project’s many partners, LSVT Global, is recruiting Canadian adults with Parkinson’s, (including those with related neurological conditions like MSA, PSP, CBD, and post-DBS).

“With more than 100,000 individuals with Parkinson’s disease in Canada, we are eager to invite these individuals to contribute their speech to this significant project,” said LSVT Global co-founder and Chief Scientific Officer Lorraine Ramig. “They too will share in the satisfaction of improving automatic speech recognition and thus quality of life for Parkinson’s disease.”

Interested in joining the project? Sign up online.